When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Little, Brown; 323 pages; $25.99

With his sixth book of daffy personal essays, David Sedaris is starting to seem like the odd, amusing man who, despite his absurdist flourishes, has told you all of his best stories several cocktail parties ago. Should you count yourself among the dozen San Franciscans who have managed to avoid National Public Radio, the New Yorker and Borders, Sedaris may seem like something of a small find, a spirited grotesque who plumbs his entire life for alternating series of punch lines and glib self-deprecation. For those already acquainted, the laughs are smaller and fewer in "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" - particularly when compared with one of Sedaris' past books, the riotous and moving "Naked" - so, too, are the quiet, humane revelations that for so long served as emotional ballast to Sedaris' comic flights.

"When You Are Engulfed in Flames," while still quite amusing and eminently readable, is a structureless repository of Sedaris' recent work. Culled largely from the New Yorker and "This American Life," these essays fall into a familiar pattern. As each piece proceeds through some sniggeringly gruesome element of Sedaris' North Carolina childhood, or a trifling hiccup in his relationship with his partner, Hugh (to whom his devotion is rather moving), or to the vagaries of living among crusty, French peasants, Sedaris grows increasingly apoplectic or aggrieved or whatever emotion happens to motivate him at the time. In the final paragraph, though, he usually forgoes the laughs and aims, not always successfully, for some grand, humane insight.

Take for instance "Road Trips," which describes his coming out and a hitchhiking trek that results in his being propositioned by a redneck who drives him down the road a piece. In what has by this point become limp for its predictability, Sedaris moves from the squirm-inducing comedy of this would-be lothario's advances into his favorite minor key: expansive truth. The essay closes by zooming the narrative out of his own head - where nearly all of this book is set - toward a more omniscient and cloying, observer: "The man would pull over, and I would take my place by the side of the road, a virgin with three dollars in his pocket, and his whole life ahead of him."

The one significant departure from this model is "The Smoking Section," the 80-page essay that closes the book. Sedaris describes his quest to quit smoking, a Herculean labor he elects to undertake while spending a couple of months with Hugh in Tokyo. This fine, well-observed essay is stronger for its hilarious descriptions of Sedaris' failed attempts to learn Japanese than for its meditations on addiction.

Absenting the more affecting pathos achieved earlier in his career, Sedaris is in his element when he sticks to left-of-center comedy. "What I Learned," an imagined commencement address to newly minted Princeton grads, is the author at his most antic (read: most indebted to Woody Allen), and his send-up of the false deference of Ivy Leaguers when asked where they went to college is priceless:

" 'Tell me, young man. Did you attend a university of higher learning?'

"To anyone holding a tool or a weapon, we were trained to respond, 'What? Me go to college? Whoever gave you that idea?' If, on the other hand, the character held a degree, you were allowed to say 'Sort of,' or, sometimes, 'I think so.'

"And it was the next bit that you had to get just right. Inflection was everything, and it took the foreign students forever to master it.

" 'So where do you sort of think you went?'

"And we'd say, 'Umm, Princeton?' - as if it were an oral exam, and we weren't quite sure that this was the correct answer."

When taking on the mores of his set - that is the educated, contrary and profoundly nervous - Sedaris is strongest. The only real complaint with this enjoyable read is the seemingly tacked-on, cheaply wrought sentimentality of some of these essays. Fans of Sedaris will find plenty to like, though, and for those just arriving at this particular cocktail party, by all means, spend some time with the host. {sbox}

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